


a second time (within these arms)

by sokovianaccords (eurogirl)



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Peggy Carter Lives, Reunited and It Feels So Good, Steggy Secret Santa, They Need To Work Things Out First, Well...Not at First
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2019-04-04 22:59:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14030718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eurogirl/pseuds/sokovianaccords
Summary: Peggy Carter needs an extraction from a mission gone sideways.This is NOT what she had in mind.





	a second time (within these arms)

**Author's Note:**

> A pinch-hit fic written for wolviecat as part of the 2017 Steggy Secret Santa exchange
> 
> Title comes from Pericles by William Shakespeare

_Ops turn._

It is a truth every agent learned early and often, a reality that can only be understood through experience. 

And with a half-century of espionage experience under her belt, it is a truth with which Peggy is intimately familiar. Even now. 

This op had been elegant in its simplicity. It was the type of mission she had undertaken hundreds of times in her career, and yet it had all gone to hell. So she called in the emergency extraction she had never thought she would need to use. 

Which led to her being _here_. In a small, enclosed space with the one man on earth she did not want to see. In total silence.

Peggy shifts in the passenger seat of the tiny, battered sedan, sweating from the combination of the unexpected exercise and the hot air blasting from the dashboard. The long few weeks undercover and her pumping adrenaline combined with the brutal heat inside the car break the only strand left of her patience, and she snaps, “Must it be a hundred and fifty degrees in _every_ space you inhabit?”

“Well I'm so sorry that I run cold ever since being in a permafrost coma for seventy years.” He runs a hand through his hair with a frustrated sigh, the strands shorter than Peggy had ever seen on him. 

“You say that like it was an accident, Steve.”

“You really want to do this right now?” he says, wrenching the steering wheel to pass a particularly slow car as he tries to put as much distance as possible between them and the angry traffickers whose secrets Peggy has been collecting for the past few months.

“Well, since you brought it up in the first place,” she hisses. “Also, it was sixty- _six_ years, not seventy.”

“Because being found in 2011 versus 2015 really makes a difference?”

Peggy shrugs. “Well if you’re going to complain, you may as well be accurate about it.”

Steve pulls to the side of the road and jams his foot on the brake, bringing the car to a stop. “Get out. You can walk to the safe house for all I care.”

She gasps in offense, but he just taps the unlock button and cranks up the heat to the highest possible setting, one eyebrow raised expectantly.

“You’re the worst extraction ever. I have no idea what HQ was thinking, sending you to pick me up.” She sits back with her arms crossed against her chest, steadily ignoring the steam coming out of his ears.

“I’m serious, Margaret. Get out of my car.”

“You know I hate it when you call me that,” she says, ass still planted firmly in the passenger seat. “I’m not walking anywhere. Can you please—for once in your life—be professional and drive me to the goddamn safe house so I can wrap my ankle and finally take my hair out of these painful pin curls?”

Steve’s hands tense where they rest on the steering wheel, eyes darting briefly to her feet resting against the dashboard. “What’d you do to your ankle?” he asks, his tone noticeably less hostile than a moment before. 

She shrugs and rubs a thumb along the offending joint. “It’s an old injury. Munich in ’44?”

"Was that the one where you jumped out the third-story window or the one where you broke your heel on a cobblestone?"

Peggy snorts. “Cobblestone. _You_ were the one who jumped out of the three-story window because that duchess was getting a little too familiar, remember?”

“Mmmm no, that doesn't sound like me,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly. 

She sits up straight, her feet falling to the floor mat. “Well, then you should have found better friends, because the Commandos told me otherwise. Two minutes after you returned to base, if even that.” 

Steve rolls his eyes. “Typical. There never was a bus they didn’t throw me under.”

They share a smile at the memory, a happy moment in the midst of the death and destruction of the war. And for the first time in this brand new century, their shared history is a relief, not a burden.

“I missed you,” Peggy sighs, resting a gentle hand on his thigh.

His brow furrows as the words escape, and her heart clenches. Even as she says the words, the memory of their brief months together after he was found rise up like bile in the back of her throat. Years of expectations and rose-colored memories and competitive stubbornness rapidly drove a wedge between them, but it was Peggy who had rung the death knell on their relationship. Losing him once had broken her heart—Steve had always inspired her most passionate feelings, both positive and negative—and she would never have recovered from getting so close and losing him a second time.

There had been a certain comfort in knowing he exists in her sphere. Tales of his acts of daring and the running tally of broken gym equipment discussed around the water cooler were enough to dull the sharpest edges of his absence. That is what she told herself. And some days, she actually believed it.

Now, sitting next to him, the hurt of the past few years playing out across his features, Peggy regrets every harsh word she had used to push him away from her. The knowledge that she caused the pain and loneliness clear in his expression —it isn’t worth it.

“Look, Steve, I—”

He holds up his hand, palm facing out, and Peggy recoils. In all her imaginings of this moment, the permutations of her apology that she has composed in her mind during stakeouts, in the shower, at the shooting range, she has never imagined he wouldn’t even let her get a word out.

Steve throws the car into gear, swearing loudly as he merges back onto the highway with enough speed to push Peggy against the back of her seat. “We’re in trouble,” he says, glancing between her and the rearview mirror. 

Peggy looks over her left shoulder to see two black SUVs three car lengths behind them and gaining rapidly. 

“They just don’t know when to quit,” she groans, unclipping her seatbelt. “Still in the glovebox?”

Steve nods. “There's a 9mm. Should be loaded.”

“Glad to see you still have some manners,” she says, popping the latch and shuffling through the loose papers to grab the loaded handgun. “Ready?”

“Here we go.” Steve grits his teeth and yanks the wheel to the left, making a sharp U-turn to face the oncoming SUVs. 

“Steve?” Peggy cranes her head out the window, popping off two shots. The first car careens off the road. “We need to talk about something.”

“Right now?” Steve ducks behind the dashboard as bullets tear through the windshield. “You want to talk now?”

She swears as a bullet catches her left arm, just above the elbow. “Okay, fine. After we kick their asses. Promise me?”

“Yup, whatever you want,” he says, foot heavy on the accelerator. “And… _duck!_ ”

————

“And you call me the dramatic one?”

Peggy raises a single eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?”

Steve traces a gentle line down her uninjured arm, leaving goosebumps in his wake. “You wanted to have a deep, meaningful conversation in the middle of a shootout.”

“Will you please just patch me up so I don’t bleed on anything else?”

He shifts on the couch to make room, pulling Peggy almost into his lap in the process. “Bossy, _bossy_.”

She scoffs but offers no retort. She grits her teeth as he wipes the gunshot wound with an alcohol cleanser. Somehow, she always manages to forget just how painful cleaning the injury can be. 

“I don’t think it needs stitches,” he says as he gently presses the bandage to her arm. “We’ll watch it for a little while, make sure it doesn’t get worse.”

“Thank you, Steve.” She folds a hand over his, weaving their fingers together.

“It never gets any easier, you know.” he says as he rests his forehead on her shoulder. 

“Exfiltrations?”

“Watching you get hurt.” 

She lifts her free hand to his cheek and pulls his head up so she can see his face. “Steve—”

“Listen, Peggy, I know we aren’t together. You've made it very clear that you don’t want that kind of relationship anymore, I get it. But that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t like it when you get shot. I worry about you. All the time.”

Peggy huffs a laugh. “Oh, my darling.”

Steve starts at the old endearment. They are so close that Peggy can feel the tension vibrating through his every muscle, and she curses herself for spending the last few years ensuring his total distrust in her. 

“I never wish to see you in danger either,” she continues, weaving her fingers through the short strands at the nape of his neck. “Rather, it sends me into quite a state. It always has, Steve. From the moment you were sealed in that horrifying steel contraption - I still hear your scream in my nightmares once in a while.”

“Peggy, I had no idea.” Steve wraps an arm around her waist and draws her into his chest. His fingers are chilly where they brush against the bare skin revealed by the distended hem of her blouse. 

“I also never told you,” she says with a shrug. “I’m telling you now to give you some…context, I guess? I’m not quite sure. I just—you say you don’t like to see me get hurt, that you worry about me. But you need to know that I feel the same. The thought of you injured, or—or killed, it drives me mad.”

Her hand trembles against his neck, and she takes a deep breath, trying to recover that stiff upper lip. “I feel terrible about how I’ve treated you over the last few years, darling. I’m so sorry, and I know there’s nothing I can do to change what I said or did. But I need you to understand that you _died._ I heard you die—I _lost you_ —and it broke my heart.”

Suddenly restless, Peggy pushes against Steve’s broad chest. “It’s not that I didn’t want to be with you anymore,” she says, rising to her feet. She paces in front of the rickety coffee table while reaching up with her uninjured arm to remove the pin curls that had kept that awful blonde wig from slipping. “It was all too much. You died, and I lived with that fact every single day for sixty-six years, Steve. You were always at the back of my mind—the months we spent building SHIELD, the day I got married, the accident with the serum that made me like you. We left so much unspoken between us during the war, and yet I spent sixty-six years with you almost constantly in my thoughts.

“And then,” she exclaims, viciously throwing the final pin toward the broken fireplace, “you’re found off the coast of Greenland, and it was—you were a miracle, Steve. I was so thrilled to have you back, to be with you again, that I thought I could brush those sixty-six years under the rug.”

Steve runs a hand through his hair and exhales harshly. Peggy pauses, struck by how young the dishevelment makes him look.

“But?” he prompts, impatient.

“But,” Peggy says, the words tight in her throat, “you went off and fought aliens and drug smugglers and pirates and anyone else who could be beaten into submission with that shiny metal shield of yours. I understood it—why you had to fight—and I still do. But every time you left, all I could think about was ‘what if’. What if you died and I was left alone for another sixty-six years, this time with even more of myself to lose?” 

“Peggy.” His voice is low, and she shivers at the way her name rolls off his tongue. Like he never wants to say anything else.

“I’m sorry, Steve,” she whispers, reaching out to brush her thumb along his cheekbone. “I am so sorry for how much I hurt you.”

He slips her hand into his and brushes his lips across her knuckles. “I missed you. And you're right. I threw myself into the only things that were familiar when I woke up—forming a team, wielding the shield, you. I thought if I could hold onto what I knew, it would make living in my new reality easier.” He rubs his thumb along the delicate bone of her wrist with a rueful chuckle. “It was not one of my better plans.” 

Peggy squeezes his hand tightly, holding herself in this moment. It’s a shift, a tilt of the axis of their relationship, as the full picture of what happened after Steve came back comes to light. “It’s not that I was unwilling to act as your anchor, darling, but—”

“No, that's not—you’re right. We were a new relationship, in a lot of ways. You and I were different people than the kids who promised each other a future, an “after". And it was a lot of pressure to put on you and on us, to hold me together as I tried to build a life in a world I didn’t know.”

Peggy bites her lip, his earnest gaze as addictive as it had been since that first day at Camp Lehigh. “Steve—”

“I love you, Peg. So much I still don’t have the words to tell you how I feel about you. And it breaks my heart that I made choices that hurt you because that’s the last thing I want.”

“My darling,” Peggy murmurs, cupping his cheek with her free hand. His eyes close at her touch, and she marvels at the way the fading sunlight drifts over the angles of his face. It’s been so many years since she first met Steve, since he was that skinny man who had stolen her attention with his heart and his determination, that she has forgotten how handsome he looks as she stands over him. The corner of his lip tilts upward in the beginnings of a smile, and Peggy is lost.

The kiss starts slow, her nose sliding along the length of his. She presses her lips to his teasing grin and can’t help the laugh that bubbles up out of her.

Steve pulls back, askance. “What? What’s so funny?”

“Sorry, Steve darling. It’s just—did you ever expect it would happen like this, with us about to make out on a couch after an op? And in our _nineties_?” Another giggle escapes, and Peggy claps a hand over her mouth, a flush rising on her cheeks.

“Well, when you say it like that, it sounds crazy,” Steve retorts, tugging Peggy onto his lap. “I think I prefer…miraculous.”

Peggy shivers against the scratch of his stubble on her neck. “I like the sound of miraculous.” 

“Yeah?” Steve weaves his fingers through her loose curls and begins to plant kisses along her jaw. “I’ve got more.”

She sinks into his embrace with a moan. “Do tell.”

A kiss to her temple. “Amazing.” 

To her brow. “Extraordinary.”

To her cheek. “Inexplicable.”

He rests his forehead against hers, and Peggy opens her eyes to see him, his gaze filled with promises of tomorrow. 

Steve runs a finger across her lips, and he whispers, “Spectacular.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed this little fic.
> 
> I'm on tumblr at thesokovianaccords if you're into that sort of thing :D


End file.
